Auto Dealer Monthly Magazine is the daily operations publication serving the retail automotive industry. This automotive publication serves dealer principals, officers and general managers with the latest best practices.
Issue link: http://autodealermonthly.epubxp.com/i/84037
industry expert / technology Focus on Optimizing Your Website for Better Conversion Ali Amirrezvani is the president, CEO and co-founder of DealerOn, Inc. He has spent the last 10 years helping DealerOn customers dramatically increase sales and profitability from their websites and online marketing efforts. He can be reached at 877.543.4200. AAmirrezvani@AutoDealerMonthly.com take a moment to reflect on the last decade or so and what it has meant for the retail automotive digital mar- keting industry. My partners and I started DealerOn about 10 years ago to help dealers sell more cars by providing them with better websites and online marketing tools. I When we started DealerOn, there were only a handful of website providers to choose from, and two companies ba- sically dominated the market. Building a site in all Flash was considered an industry stan- dard and SEO (search engine optimization) was just an acronym that vendors used to sound cool. Ten years ago, Google Analytics didn't exist, many consumers used dial- up and website A/B testing was more of a theory than a practice. At that time, with only log-based metrics soft- ware and no real optimization tools, the average dealer website converted at just n recognition of Auto Dealer Monthly's 100th issue, I thought I would under two percent. Now look at the present and consider the abundance of website providers, the power of even a free evaluation tool like Google Analytics, the availability of broadband and the ready access online agencies have to A/B testing platforms. With all of these tools, data and technology, according to Dataium—an independent, dealer-focused, third-party analytics platform with data from roughly 10,000 dealer sites—dealers' conversion rates have sky-rocketed all the way up to … 1.7 percent! I've seen dealers for a decade chase the next shiny digital marketing tool instead of focusing on proven digital marketing best practices. I'm challenging all Internet service managers, Internet directors, general managers and dealer principals to stop looking for lightning in a bot- tle and start demanding more of their digital marketing efforts and vendors. Website conversion is one of the most important and definitely one of the most overlooked areas of a dealer's Internet market- ing efforts. There is an enormously broad range of conversion ratesthe number of website lead form submissions per unique monthly visitorfor dealer websites, even websites within an OEM . I have seen many dealer sites convert at eight percent or more, while their competitors, selling the same inventory in the same market, are using sites that convert at 2 percent, roughly the national average, or less. The financial impacts of that are staggering! The average dealer website gets roughly 4,000 unique visitors per month. If that site converts at two percent, that means it is generating only 80 leads per month. Meanwhile, its analytics-savvy competitor using a well-optimized web- site is generating 320 leads from the same number of visits. Assuming both dealers are converting about 15 percent of their leads to sales, the "average" dealer is selling 12 cars per month out of his Internet department while our savvy dealer is selling 48. Which dealership do you think is still going to be around for Auto Dealer Monthly's 200th issue?